Month: September 2019

Review by Karen Topham, ChicagoOnstage, member American Theatre Critics Association. Photo by North Shore Camera Club. Many of us can remember watching the Peter Pan musical with Mary Martin (and later Sandy Duncan) in the title role in our childhoods. J.M. Barrie’s story of the boy who wouldn’t grow up has, over the years, spawned a […]

Review by Karen Topham, ChicagoOnstage, member American Theatre Critics Association. Photo by Emily Schwartz. The first time I saw Peter Shaffer’s award-winning psychological drama Equus was in its initial production in Chicago back in the late 70s, not long after its 1974 Broadway premiere. If memory serves, Ken Howard of TV’s “The White Shadow” played […]

When Joey Cranford’s wife jokingly bought him a magic kit they had seen at Walgreens as a Christmas present, she had no idea what she had unleashed. “There was an especially good trick in there,” he says, one that spurred the research-oriented Cranford to begin exploring what magic is and eventually led him to discover […]

Review by Karen Topham, ChicagoOnstage, member American Theatre Critics Association. Photo by Joe Mazza, Brave Lux Photography. By now, there are enough books and plays depicting dystopian futures that it would almost be more outlandish to imagine a future in which the world just goes on as it is. Of course, fear of what may […]

Review by Karen Topham, ChicagoOnstage, member American Theatre Critics Association. Photo by Brett Beiner. In our ever more divisive political atmosphere, at a time when the left and the right attack each other as if they were mortal enemies (and sometimes actually are), it is difficult even to imagine the possibility of these two extremes […]

Review by Karen Topham, ChicagoOnstage, member American Theatre Critics Association. Photo by Liz Lauren. 19th Century French actress Sarah Bernhardt was a powerful woman calling her own shots at a time when few women anywhere got to do so. As such, she is a perfect subject for a feminist play. Theresa Rebeck’s Bernhardt/Hamlet certainly has […]

Review by Ed Rubin, member of American Theatre Critics Association, NYC’s Drama Desk, and the Outer Critics Circle; photo by Richard Hubert Smith Sea Wall/A Life, two extraordinarily powerful one-act plays, presented in monologue form, are holding court at the Hudson Theatre on Broadway. Fueled by strong reviews, and the star power of film and […]

Review by Beverly Friend, Ph.D., American Theater Critics Association member I have never wept so copiously – before or after any film – as I did in 1948, sitting next to my young Catholic girlfriend at the climactic moment of Joan of Arc, starring Ingrid Bergman. In our early adolescence, both of us identified with Joan and […]

Review by Karen Topham, ChicagoOnstage, member American Theatre Critics Association. Photo by Liz Lauren. By this time, we are more than used to seeing popular movies remade into plays and musicals. The King’s Speech, 2011 Academy Award winner for Best Picture, has taken a rather different journey to its current incarnation at Chicago Shakespeare Theatre. […]

Review by Karen Topham, American Theatre Critics Association member; photo by Brett Beiner Photography. Overall, Broadway musicals have been a historically white medium. Though Porgy and Bess is generally seen as a classic, in the decades since we have witnessed only a small percentage of musicals that show the Black experience in America. The vast […]